R. Nesbitt | Red Phoenix correspondent | Maryland–

Even before the inauguration of Trump, Elon Musk cycled in the media often enough through his ridiculous clamoring for this second administration. His is a record of incoherent blathering but in it all, he is one of the bourgeoisie with the lack of awareness to look at the camera and warn us all of the intentions of himself and his ilk. Now this incredibly wealthy man, with no history of government experience, who is running one of the most popular social media applications in history to the ground, whose rockets can’t even find their way off the landing pad, is entrusted by the Trump administration to counsel the government in the regulation of wasteful spending.

Indeed it is odd that Musk is the sort to care so much for wasteful spending considering how in 2024 alone, he was granted $3 billion in government contracts, and with his current, unelected direction of the Department of Government Efficiency, he is earning $18 million in grants daily. Wasting money, to prevent the wasting of money, that is the American (bourgeois) way! 

It should be enough to condemn Musk from his endorsement of the far-right AfD party in Germany and the reactionary rhetoric he used in doing so, or his petulant whine on Twitter a few years ago declaring that “we (capitalists) will coup whoever we want!” in response to outrage over the Nov. 2019 coup of the Evo Morales government of Bolivia, as a consequence for his plans to nationalize Bolivia’s bountiful lithium mines, on which Musk depends for the production of his electrical vehicles. Capitalist ecology at its finest!

Any self-respecting country, any country that considers itself a democracy, should have buried this man’s career the moment he gave multiple Nazi salutes on stage at the Republican National Convention in Jan. 2025. But instead, in this climate of fascistization, this man is undemocratically appointed to poorly-defined positions of power in the largest empire in human history. 

In his current role as Senior Advisor to the President and as the leader of the DOGE, Musk has made no shortage of waves in his bloodthirsty assaults on the already insufficient concessions to working people in this country. He has overseen the merciless cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and USAID; and layoffs and hiring freezes to OSHA, the Department of Education, and the National Park Service. On March 3, 2025, he called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” which is founded on a big-government misinformation campaign.

More is sure to come, and there are far too many cuts and layoffs and grant cancellations to cover here, but this frenzied financial offensive is not only a sociopathic attack on working people, it is the perfect exposure of the inevitable priorities of the American capitalist class. Let no one deceive you, any government that cuts millions of dollars in safe jobs, healthcare, housing, and food for workers, a clean and safe environment — all the while inflating hundreds of billions of dollars in the military industrial complex, and in contracts to the modern oil barons — a government that pushes off tax cuts for workers while striving to renew tax cuts for billionaires, is not a government concerned with fiscal responsibility. It is a government that callously and openly seeks to relieve capitalism in America from the crises of its own making.

When discussing the theoretically economic grounds of fascism, Benito Mussolini wrote that fascism is “better called ‘corporatism’ as it is the combination of corporation and the state.” Now, when one of the richest men in the world, a dollar-store Bond villain, successfully lobbies and bribes (or in the American parlance, “donates”) his way to a position of ministerial value in breaking apart regulatory bodies that could and should hinder his own pursuit of super-profits, who is using his influence for fat government contracts, who is helping to push through massive extensions of investment to monopoly corporations in armaments and industry, what else can this be called but the combination of corporation and state?

To the credit of liberalism they aren’t taking these maneuvers laying down. After all, the contest between Democrats and Republicans is generally a contest between two factions of the same party of the bourgeoisie vying for more influence over the largest war chest in human history, and in the meandering pandering of the liberals they grimly bemoan the arrival of “oligarchy.”

But the working class knows that oligarchy has always been inherent in our government, to our state built by, fought for, and constantly bought and paid for by the American bourgeoisie. If you were to see Reagan’s trickle down fairy tale, Clinton’s financial deregulation, Bush’s meetings with oil executives months before the war with Iraq, Obama’s tax cuts, deregulation and oversight of legalized bribery in the form of donations, Trump initially bringing tycoons like Tillerson and DeVos to cannibalize the ministries they were elected to oversee, Biden bowing out of proper stimuli, running from the Green New Deal, leaving workers out to dry on union protections, and so much else — you will see that oligarchy has always twisted and writhed at the heart of American democracy.

What we are witnessing now is the shedding of all patches and ointments applied to ease the pains of exploitation on the working class, won by workers’ efforts in the constant struggle for greater, more genuine democracy. This is the degenerative maturation, like a werewolf of fiction, of the open and unapologetic class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Musk and his ilk — for Trump is himself bourgeois and has used his office for his own profit and security — and all their foul deeds, are only the symptoms, not the illness itself, of a class dictatorship that will always exist, always exploit, always repress until it is overthrown.

Categories: Economy, Government, U.S. News